aggressive.
Madame
Eve LaBelle, without thinking of the long-term implications of her
actions, had used her conjure to fill the swamps of Florida with a
new kind of reptile. If a poacher came across a shifted gator, he
often was in for a surprise, because everything he thought he knew
about alligators would turn out to be wrong.
Since
no one from any of the cursed families had exposed the situation to
outsiders in over a hundred years, that meant that no one from the
state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission knew what they were
dealing with, either.
Up
until now, Brandy had figured out she was the only shifter in the
bunch at Animal Sphere. That would change tonight when the
Cliburn brothers arrived.
The
Cliburn brothers were no good and plenty worse than Ray. Brandy
had no doubt they were inbred, nasty as they were on all levels. Okay,
fine, she
would admit, all
shifters intermarry among the seven families, but still, most of us
try to keep it no closer than third cousins.
Jesse,
Bobby and Hugh Cliburn were crystal meth dealers. They had
supplied Brandy's little brother Charlie, who was hell-bent on his
own path of destruction and overdosed on crystal meth at the age of
19.
She
didn't recognize them at first, but they sure as hell recognized
her.
These
were three shifters who were too crazy for payback to be afraid of
her size. Hugh had learned the hard way what Brandy could do when she
was pissed enough. After Charlie's funeral, Brandy ran into
Hugh at a bar and spat in his face. Her friends held her off
him, and he let the incident pass.
But
Brandy wasn't about to let this go. She forced Marianne to help
her stalk him for weeks after that, figuring out his every move, and
then she planned to get the bastard at his weakest moment.
Marianne was scared of this plan, but she could not blame Brandy for
her wrath over her brother's death. Plus, Brandy had a
reputation for delivering 'swamp justice'. This wouldn't be the
first time she'd be doing the state of Florida a favor by getting rid
of some bad guys.
So
Marianne eventually also agreed to drive Brandy to one of Hugh's
known delivery points, based on a tip that he was making a drop that
night.
On
that night Hugh had shifted, then swallowed small bags of his stash.
Brandy and Marianne had figured out by then that his covert modus
operandi was
to make large deliveries by swimming to his connection in gator form,
then expelling his narcotics stash out through his other end.
Brandy's
plan was to ambush Hugh Cliburn – mid-shit – on
land while he was still in gator form with a belly full of drugs not
yet fully expelled. She would kill him immediately, which meant
that Hugh's body would shift back into human form. Brandy would
leave him there, dead and naked in his own excrement filled with
little baggies of crystal meth, for the cops to discover.
But
things didn't go quite so well as planned.
Brandy
did, indeed, ambush Hugh. She clamped her jaws shut on his left human
arm and yanked him into a death roll, which is a technique that all
alligators use in battle. Gators will lock on to someone or
something with their massive jaws, then twist their whole body in a
repetitive full body roll. The goal is to snap the
opponent's bones, ligaments, or whatever else, using torque.
Hugh
was wily, though. Instead of fighting her, he rolled WITH her.
As long as he could keep rolling with her, he might lose some real
blood, but his arm probably would not break. She managed to
dislocate his shoulder, but that was it. Brandy must have
rolled about ten times